Vinegar Girl in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Mar 31, 2017 Marlene rated it did not like it

Shelves: wtf-did-i-just-read, specialsnowflake, read-2017, jesus-h-roosevelt-christ, the-wooooorst

Bunny Battista was right. She IS the only normal one in this family.

This had all sorts of nonsense:
-Casual racism/xenophobia? ✔
- Sexism? ✔
- Special Snowflake Syndrome?✔
- Shaming teenagers for being teenagers? ✔
- Bad writing in general? ✔✔✔✔

This was a disaster from start to finish and kept getting worse. The only parts of this book I had any sort of interest in was Bunny (seriously the best character of the whole thing) and the romance/drama between the ballerina & sailor dolls the girls were p ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Aug 25, 2016 Jane rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, recentfiction

A modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. So funny that I often laughed outloud. Kate, the "vinegar girl" has taken care of her father, her much younger sister and the house since their mother died after the younger sister's birth. She also works at a daycare center. Pyotr is the "tamer." Both of these characters say, do and think very funny, even outrageous things. I'll read this again when I need to be cheered up. It has all of Tyler's interest in the ordinary screwed up American family w ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Feb 12, 2019 Kristin rated it it was ok

Shelves: ebooks

Read this for the PopSugar Reading Challenge's 'Retelling of a Classic' prompt, as it is an interpretation of Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew'. That said, I've never read the original and chose it based on the description of the story on its own. Kate Battista reminds me a lot of myself, a single woman past the age at which her peers have married and started their own families, who lives at home with her dad and younger sibling and not entirely sure what the future holds. Yet we are diffe Read this for the PopSugar Reading Challenge's 'Retelling of a Classic' prompt, as it is an interpretation of Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew'. That said, I've never read the original and chose it based on the description of the story on its own. Kate Battista reminds me a lot of myself, a single woman past the age at which her peers have married and started their own families, who lives at home with her dad and younger sibling and not entirely sure what the future holds. Yet we are different in that she merely tolerates her job, while I have poured the last decade of my life into mine, and my father is thankfully not pressuring me into finding a mate.
Dr. Battista is the scientist of the family, on the verge of a breakthrough discovery with the help of his Eastern European assistant Pyotr. Unfortunately, Pytor's visa is about up, but Dr. Battista gets the brilliant idea of arranging a marriage between Kate and Pytor, merely to keep Pytor from being deported. Headstrong in every way, from telling the children, and their parents, at the preschool where she works exactly what she thinks, to serving as pseudo-mother to her teenage sister Bunny, scrutinizing Bunny's sudden interest in their 20 year-old stoner neighbor as a 'Spanish tutor', Kate is appalled at her father's nerve. To Kate, it's just a continuation of Dr. Battista's 15 year obsession with his job at the expense of his daughters, and every encounter with Pyotr is awkward and uncomfortable. To Pyotr however, Kate is extremely fascinating and his first true experience with American culture, as the only other people he interacts with are the quirky Dr. Battista, his elderly landlord, and his landlord's caretaker, an East Asian lady also relatively new to the country.
I have not read any of Tyler's previous work, and while this story was OK, it didn't necessarily inspire me to seek out more of her books. It was a short read, and I ended up conflicted, in that the story felt like it was underdeveloped, yet what was there bordered on the repetitive. Again, having not read the original, perhaps Tyler was limited by the constraints of the story, but I read Jo Nesbo's 'Macbeth' from the same series of Shakespeare interpretations, also an original I'd not read, and that was a long, deep book that left me with a good concept of Shakespeare's play, whereas this seemed to just barely skim the surface. ...more

Like · see review